On March 6, 2024, Guoxue said: "Cangli knows etiquette and etiquette, and only when there is enough food and clothing will he know honor and shame." "Rites are born out of existence and discarded in nothingness. Therefore, a gentleman is rich and willing to be kind; The villain is rich, with the right strength. The water is deep, the fish are born, the mountains are deep and the beasts are gone, the people are rich, and the righteousness is attached.
The minimum demand economy is the minimum requirement of the elements of survival needed to meet the survival needs of the family or oneself. This definition may not be accurate, but the essence is to live. At this stage, or at the heart of everyday economic activity, everything revolves around this.
Before the Industrial Revolution, manpower was the most basic driving force for production, and agricultural production was the most important sector of the social economy. In a minimum demand economy characterized by self-sufficiency with no surplus product, food and clothing, which are vital to survival, are king. For a long time before the reform and opening up, the model of money + votes was the stage when supply exceeded demand, and at this stage, very money was subject to votes, and votes were worth more than money to a certain extent. Obviously, in an economy of minimum demand, money is only a means of money exchange, a symbol of wealth, and there is no other "room for the use of force." As described in Maslow's needs model, from the bottom of the hierarchy upwards, the needs are: physiological (food and clothing), safety (job security), social needs (friendship), respect and self-actualization. When society as a whole fails to meet basic needs at the lowest level, it is difficult to say that there are higher levels of needs upward. People in wartime are inferior to dogs in peacetime, this is a reality that is nakedly unwilling to accept.
There are only 100 sheep in a certain period of time in the whole closed society, and different people barter according to different needs, and this kind of trade is not equal in value. If the total amount of official currency issued is 100 yuan, each sheep is worth 1 yuan, and if 1000 yuan is issued, each sheep is worth 10 yuan. Severe inflation is generated. In the economy with low productivity, in the economy with no minimum demand for surplus products, money is only a means of exchange, a symbol of wealth, and it must also be based on the physical object to meet the needs of survival. Stabilize the energy power of the foundation. The invention of the steam engine solved the breakthrough of manpower, animals, unstable power in nature, etc., and provided stable power**. As a result, the increase in productivity has greatly reduced the time required for production and the space constraints of transportation, and labor productivity has been unprecedentedly improved. This is an important factor in the transformation of a subsistence economy into an industrial economy, a driving force for the transformation of the traditional family-style work mode into large-scale industrial production, and a prerequisite for industrialization. To a large extent, the occurrence of money is related to the exchange of "mutual existence and non-existence", rather than the pursuit of value realization by the surplus products of society, because in the tens of millions of years before the industrial revolution, the economic form of human society was the "minimum demand economy".
In the minimum demand economy, the individuals in the society are around the elements of survival, all the purpose is to live, this stage actually appeared not only in the primitive period, but also in different historical periods, especially at the end of the feudal dynasty, when the people's survival was hungry and unclothed.
At this stage, the goal of the vast majority of members of society is to survive, in order to obtain products that meet the needs of survival, mainly food, clothing, housing. The purpose of subsistence social production is mainly to maintain simple reproduction, including the reproduction of labor power. The scale of social commodity exchange is negligible due to the limited surplus product, due to the self-sufficiency of production. Therefore, at this stage, as long as it refers to the pre-industrial economy, the small family workshop is the main economic form. The "minimum demand economy" is formed on the basis of an economy without growth.
Therefore, in a minimum demand economy, the vast majority of people in society are in order to survive, and the small-scale peasant economy is a prominent feature, and the timely production of surplus money in exchange is only a kind of food and clothing, shelter and transportation.